Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  I waited a heartbeat. “Yes, that’s true.”

  Yet, quietly, I kept repeating over and over the same refrain, echoing in my head, beating against my heart: You’ve met the killer, Edna, in the hotel where you are staying. You will see that killer across a breakfast table at the Café Europa. Or on the terrace. In the garden. And then, in a moment of awful but exhilarating crystallization, I knew I’d stumble upon the answer. But when? How? I knew it was but a matter of days.

  ***

  Later that evening I stood at the huge window in my rooms, my palm resting on the glass as I stared out onto the quay. A narrow view from my room, a sliver of pavement and streetlight and Danube and a hint of Castle Hill beyond. Moonlight softened the Danube, and the ghostly streetlight threw shifting shadows onto the pavement. I stood there too long, my shoulders aching, but I was captured by the postcard moment. A chromolithograph of a faraway land caught on a stereopticon. Ah, Budapest!

  While I lingered there, my mind drifting, I spotted István Nagy sitting down on the bench, stretching out his legs, adjusting the scarf around his neck. He appeared to be staring back at the Hotel Árpád, or at least I believed he was, because his body was stationary, his head unmoving.

  My eyes focused, sharp. What was there about that poet that rankled? Then, staring, I realized that Jonathan Wolf was walking by. He stopped a second, stepped back and obviously said something to István Nagy. Then he moved away but immediately returned. He was waving his hands in the air, pointing into István’s face. The poet turned aside, his back to Wolf, but finally stood up. An awful pantomime, the two of them, with István now gesticulating wildly, head bobbing. Under the hoary streetlight both men seemed random characters on a stage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bumbling through a scene. Each gestured, each backed off. My face pressed against the glass, I wondered what was being said—and why. Suddenly Jonathan threw his hands into the air and moved away.

  In a quick, jerky move, István lunged after the American and shoved him, propelling the man forward.

  They both disappeared from my line of sight.

  I waited.

  A second later István came back into view, standing in front of the bench, alone now, but swaying back and forth, as though trying to maintain his balance. Then he stretched out his arms toward the hotel, in my direction. And though my own reaction was irrational and stupid, I pulled back quickly from the window as if to avoid being spotted. My heart was beating wildly. I felt frightened, but that made no sense.

  Chapter Ten

  The following evening, a warm night with puffy clouds against a lazy blue-gray nighttime sky, Winifred and I wandered through Váci Utca, mingling with the crowds who promenaded there, getting lost in the narrow mews and cobbled lanes. We bought postcards at a little kiosk by the underground train station. Peasant girls strolled by, each one in an embroidered jacket, each with colorful skirts over a dozen petticoats billowing out like old cotillion gowns on American debutantes. Legs covered in blue stockings. Arms jingling with bracelets. We stopped for supper at The Green Band, sitting at a table covered with a linen cloth so starched its edges were knife-sharp. The waiters, thrilled to be serving tourists, insisted we sample the fogas, a delicate freshwater fish from the Lake Balaton waters. Of course, we did—and oohed and aahed appropriately. A dreamy evening, happily spent away from the Hotel Árpád and its murderous echoes.

  I’d spent the afternoon visiting a cousin of my father, an ancient woman living in Eperye, a village outside of Budapest. A short train ride from Eastern Station, and an afternoon of coffee and powdered sugar doughnuts at a little café high in the hills, accompanying an impossible conversation that was a labored mixture of German and Yiddish but mostly silence. I’d written her earlier from Berlin, and we’d had planned the meeting, but she had few memories of my father as a young man. She recalled a skinny, high-spirited boy, bashful and polite, a yeshiva boy, but then she acknowledged her memory might be of another boy in the village. We ended up staring at each other before I walked the kilometer back to the train depot and happily returned to Budapest.

  “My father,” I was telling Winifred, “never liked to talk of those early days in the village, just his delight in visiting Budapest as a young man. For him, America was his only conversation.” I paused. “And yet America failed him. A struggling life, one bankrupt store after another.” I took a sip of wine. “And an early blindness and then death. You travel across continents to find—emptiness.”

  Winifred nodded. “But he was a loving father.”

  I grinned. “And I was his favorite daughter.” I tapped the table. “I insist on that—to the horror of my older sister Fannie.” I looked around the restaurant. A beautiful place with potted greenery, walls tiled in white majolica tiles, discreet streamers overhead in the Hungarian colors—red, green, and white. “He never wanted to return to Hungary.”

  “But now you have.”

  “And I feel nothing of him here.”

  “Well, America gets in the blood.”

  “Does England get in the blood the same way?” I asked her.

  “Not for me, I’m afraid. I’m the daughter of a vocal and much-hated militant suffragette mother, an amateur artist who talked only of the world—out there.” She pointed into the heavens. “I’m just continuing her struggle.”

  “Someday.”

  “Soon.”

  “And your father?” I asked.

  She smiled. “A quiet man who wrote essays about Cézanne and Monet. He died—hit by a runaway carriage. But I remember him as my mother’s fiercest advocate.”

  “Then he was a good man.”

  Happy, we smiled at each other.

  Back at the hotel, Winifred suggested a glass of sherry at the Café Europa, and I agreed. Our supper conversation, speckled with nightmarish images of my ailing, handsome father and the golden America he dreamed of, had left me melancholic. My mother was in Berlin, but was never a comfort to me: the judgmental eye, disapproving, demanding. Her hold on me was velvet, but unyielding. And my leaving her there was—treason. I quaked. Distance exaggerated my betrayal. I felt alone in the world, and somehow an aimless tourist abroad, a solitary woman with too many suitcases, the thirty-year-old spinster—images that struck me as a faded photograph in a vellum-embossed family album I never wanted to open.

  Walking in, we spotted Endre Molnár sitting alone in the café, a bottle of wine before him, his shoulders slumped forward, elbows on the table.

  Markov rushed to us, gratitude in his face, as though our random coins would be his salvation. He pointed to Endre, who had not looked up. All the tables around him were empty, and the lit candle on his table, flickering because of a slight breeze from the terrace, made his profile appear ghastly.

  “Him,” Markov pointed. “The sad man. Him. Sit with him. Please.” Stuttered words, monosyllabic, pleading. He motioned us toward Endre’s able, and we let him.

  “Mr. Molnár,” I began, and he looked up.

  Endre offered a tentative smile and then closed his sleepy eyes. He leaned forward, gripping the wine glass so tightly I feared it would shatter. When he looked back up at me, that handsome face trembled, uncertain. A ghost of a smile, almost not there, appeared, then disappeared. He was dressed in a tight-fitting black linen jacket with polished gold buttons over a magenta-colored silk shirt, open at the neck. Billowing peasant-style trousers tucked into high red boots. Very appealing. I thought, though a tad dissolute and Bohemian. A slight beard stubble on his chin, the result of a failed morning shave, but the grand life-of-its-own moustache looked waxed and manicured. Even a grieving man must keep his priorities, and in this age of the tonsorially splendid moustache—from the walrus bushiness of an American president to the slick, toothbrush fuzz of a vaudeville villain—a man never forgot that caterpillar above his upper lip. Frankly, I preferred the clean-shaven face of a Woodrow Wilson. I never agreed with E
lla Wheeler Wilcox who insisted that kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt. Clever, but faulty.

  “Please.” He pointed to chairs opposite him as he struggled to stand and bow.

  Winifred and I sat down. “Should you be sitting here alone?” I asked.

  A bittersweet smile. “I still expect to see Cassandra sitting there”—he pointed to the table near the terrace where she regularly sat, guarded by Mrs. Pelham—“making too much noise. The silly little girl who was never silly around me. A bright and charming woman, she was.”

  “Mr. Molnár, my condolences, sir.”

  He looked into my face. “There are times I burn with anger.”

  “Anger?”

  “I want to strike out. To hit someone.”

  “But…”

  He shook his head slowly, and the corners of his mouth twitched. “I have a temper, I am afraid. Hungarians are dark and moody”—he smiled wistfully—“as everyone will tell you. But the struck match sparks a bonfire. You will hear that about me.” His eyes drifted from the terrace to the kitchen. “That is why so many people think I murdered Cassandra.”

  “Who thinks that?” Winifred asked, indignant.

  “The police, I tell you. That…that dreadful man from Vienna. Baron Meyerhold. He has his men following me everywhere. They sit outside my apartment. They look through my mail as it arrives on the doorstep. He says to me: Confess, confess. And I say—to what?”

  “Well,” I said, “he is an intimidating man, a man I disliked immediately. I don’t trust such pumped-up authority, all bluster and swagger.”

  “It’s his job, he tells me. In the service of the Crown. The Military Chancery. And the American authorities—Washington. A senator from Connecticut is sending telegrams to Vienna. William Randolph Hearst has trumpeted the murder on page one. Lots of angry ink, let me tell you. Vienna only cares because, well, Washington is sending up dark smoke signals. So now Count Frederic demands it. His honor, his integrity, his…love. But I don’t believe that. The count has already forgotten this…this little interlude with the American girl he never even smiled at. A man without a soul, that one.”

  “That sounds so cruel.”

  “But true. Why else was she so…unhappy. You know, I saw the changes in her. When I met her, she was quiet, laughed lightly—never the brat everyone saw her as later on. When you laugh all the time, and so loudly, you…”

  I finished for him. “You are telling the world something is wrong.”

  He nodded. “Yes. Yes.” He stared into my face. “You understood that about her. You saw that.”

  “Mr. Molnár,” I said after a bit, “Cassandra spoke to me in Gerbeaud’s. For some reason she trusted me, and she wanted to talk to me. It never happened. She was frightened of something. Not just unhappy about a ridiculous marriage. But afraid. Something bothered her. I think she believed she was in danger.”

  He watched me for a long time. “Of course,” he said matter-of-factly. “The person who murdered her.”

  That startled me. Winifred leaned into him. “What do you mean?”

  ”I mean, her death was not the result of robbers or Gypsies or…or bandits from the Buda hills who just happened to be in the garden so late at night. Ridiculous, such talk. She was going to meet me there. But such a meeting was unusual for her. Not a rendezvous you can time by a clock or date by a calendar—it was a sudden plan. Her idea—spur of the moment.” He paused. “Maybe—because she was frightened of something. She needed me to help her.” He trembled. “Something had happened to her. She sneaks away from Mrs. Pelham to meet me.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Pelham.” I pictured that severe woman in the corridor, backed against the wall, watching, in her nightgown. The dangerous sleepwalker.

  “Who is still at the hotel,” Endre noted. “She is staying in one of the rooms, so I heard. Left behind by the Blaines like…like debris. Waiting for a new family to arrive.”

  “Really?”

  “Like the count, she too forgets. But then she never liked Cassandra.”

  “Well, that was clear,” I said.

  “Cassandra told me. She told her parents how Mrs. Pelham pinched her. And they did nothing. They didn’t care.”

  He poured some wine into a goblet and stared at it. But then he pushed the glass away. “Enough,” he said to himself. “A man who drinks alone is dangerous. My head pounds from too much drink, and my eyes tear from sadness.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I told him.

  His bleary eyes got wide, unblinking. “My apartment is a prison cell.” A low, strained laugh. “Perhaps I’ll be in a real prison cell in a few days.”

  “You did not kill Cassandra,” I announced.

  “Edna, really,” said Winifred.

  “Some things I know.”

  He smiled mournfully. “Well, thank you, Miss Ferber.” He looked toward the kitchen. “But when I walked in here tonight, the waiters rushed away, muttering, watching, fumbling to get away from me. My dear Markov, that soul of diplomacy and someone I know for years, he talks to me with hesitation, looking over my shoulder as if waiting for Baron Meyerhold to rescue him from the crazed murderer. So polite, but in his eyes—you know, the…the fear that, yes, Endre Molnár, the rich Hungarian, may have killed the one he loved.” He choked up. “Here in that garden I first said to her, ‘Szeretlek.’”

  Winifred and I stared at him.

  A crooked smile. “I love you.”

  I watched him closely. “Were you surprised to receive that note from her?”

  “No.” A heartbeat. “I expected it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We did communicate, dear ladies, I confess. Now and then—but rarely. She’d slip a note to the desk clerk with my name on it. A few coins changed hands. Or I’d slip a note to her, though not recently. Not since the count and his dreadful mother arrived in Budapest this last time. She didn’t dare. Mrs. Pelham was a fierce watchdog, a woman who ran with gossip. But we used to write notes—‘Hello. How are you?’ But that night I got a note. I think she was bothered after I saw her in here—when I stormed out like a madman. My fault—I was in a foul mood. She was acting crazy then. ‘Meet me at midnight in the garden.’ That’s what she said.” He punched one fist into the palm of his other hand. “A note now in the hands of Baron Meyerhold after his men searched my rooms. My note and hers. Two pieces of evidence. A death sentence in the Austrian Empire.”

  I shrugged it away. “That means nothing. An assignation. Two lovers…former lovers who…” I trailed off.

  “Yes, a love that was over. But not over.”

  I thought of something. “Tell me something, Mr. Molnár. I know that midnight assignation didn’t take place. I believe that. You know that I was there. I saw you pacing the quay. I saw you heading down the steps to the Danube. I think I heard her voice in the garden.”

  He watched me closely. “Yes, I waited but she never appeared. Or she came after I left—I didn’t wait long enough maybe. Or”—he shuddered—“she was already dead in the garden. Crazy, I walked onto the Chain Bridge, lingered for an hour in the middle of the bridge, staring like a simpleton down into the Danube, even thought I’d hurl my body into the waters. But then I walked home.”

  “But,” I began slowly, “you did meet in the garden before that night. True? That wouldn’t have been the first time.”

  He watched me, a twinkle in his eye. “Smart American woman, you are, Miss Ferber. Yes. Midnight. Once or twice before. Some time ago, though. After she was lost to me—handed over to the count like a dress bought in a store. But only when Mrs. Pelham was fast asleep.”

  “She wasn’t that night.”

  “No, she woke up and went to look for Cassandra.”

  “Maybe she murdered her,” Winifred offered.

  The blunt remark jolted us, and
we sat there, silent, looking away.

  Endre said nothing, but he bit his lip, his eyes getting moist again.

  “Tell me about the other times.”

  Lowering his voice, he said, “Two times in the night garden. One kiss. One hug. Two times in tears. We both cried.” Then he said something in Hungarian. It sounded like a poem, the cadence lilting, melodious. We waited. Then, finally, back to English. “I am sorry. It is a song I used to sing to her.”

  “Did she mention her upcoming marriage?” I probed.

  “Of course. What other subject is there for a girl in captivity?”

  “There’s the hunger for escape. Freedom,” Winifred answered.

  Endre eyed her curiously. “Sometimes a slave loses hope.” A sigh. “But yes—that was her dream, too.”

  “How?” From me.

  “Well, in the early days when the betrothal was announced, she did talk of escape. She wanted to go back to America. She wanted to disobey her parents and rush back to America. She hated the count, she said. Whenever he looked into her face, she said he didn’t see her. Each time with him was like a…a meeting. Contracts drawn. Papers signed, ink on the line. Cattle in the stockyard. Evaluated. Looked at. Nodded at. A price given. Her mother did all the talking. The countess barely spoke, unhappy with Americans, but resigned to her horrible fate—chained to an American bank.”

  “This all seems impossible to me,” I exclaimed. “How could this possibly be a marriage?”

  “It has nothing to do with love.”

  “Clearly.”

  “But I made a big mistake.” His hand trembled, gripping the half-empty glass. “I told her she had to marry the count.”

  That shocked me. “But why?”

  “Because in my world, this world—what the poet István Nagy would call the beleaguered Old World of Europe—you must obey your parents. Many families choose their children’s partners. For centuries. It is…routine. Love is often not considered or expected, though our music and operettas talk of nothing else.”